Did You Know?

Director Peter Weir chose to shoot the film in chronological order to better capture the development of the relationships between the boys and their growing respect for Mr. Keating.

Loosely based on the experiences of private school students with Samuel Pickering, who is currently a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Originally slated to be filmed at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, the project was moved to Delaware because it would have been too expensive to create fake snow on the campus grounds.

Peter Weir attended The Scots College, a private boys school in Sydney. The uniforms, discipline and overall feel of the school translated into many of the film's scenes. In 1994 a stage production of the film, the first in the world authorized by Touchstone Pictures, was put on by the school. Peter Weir attended the opening night and spoke about the making of the film.

Charlie Dalton has copied some lines from Abraham Cowley's poem "The Prophet" on the centerfold of Elaine Reynolds, Miss October 1959.

The movie's line "Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary." was voted as the #95 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).

The poem by Henry David Thoreau that is featured on the front page of the poetry book Neil receives is not an original poem by Thoreau. Rather, it is a rearrangement of sentences from his work "Where I Lived", Chapter 2. The passage containing the quotes seen in the movie actually reads "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, ..."

Mr Perry wants his son Neil to be a doctor. Robert Sean Leonard (Neil) would later play a doctor in _"House" (2004)_.

According to a 1991 interview on Late Night with David Letterman, Lara Flynn Boyle was told the day of the film's premier that she had been edited out of the film and should not attend the premier.

The mathematical formula for rating poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard is PxI=G.

The boy in the movie who says the line "The cat sat on a mat" was a St. Andrew's student at the time. He earned more than his teachers that year.

In the very last scene, Cameron was supposed to stand on his desk as well. But Dylan Kussman vetoed the idea, because he didn't think it was in character. He was surprised when Peter Weir agreed.

The scene where Todd cries outside in the snow was done in one take. It was originally an interior scene, but when it started to snow, Peter Weir thought the scene might have more impact if it were done outside. The snow was already beginning to let up so it had to be done in one take. Fortunately, Ethan Hawke managed it.

Ethan Hawke's first impression of Peter Weir was that he "spoke funny". Weir was the first Australian that the young Hawke had ever met.

To help his young leads bond, Peter Weir had them all room together.

Although this never actually cracked the number one spot at the box office, it still grossed $96 million domestically and over $235 million worldwide.

Norman Lloyd was most surprised to discover that he was expected to audition for the film. Initially, he refused. He said that he'd just finished six years of St. Elsewhere and that the producers should use that. He was told that Peter Weir was on location and had never seen Lloyd's TV series, so Lloyd finally acquiesced.

The draft that writer Tom Schulman sent out to the studios was his first one.

Initially Peter Weir had planned to make Green Card in 1989 but Gerard Depardieu proved to be unavailable for a full year. Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg suggested to Weir that he should make another film in the intervening year and handed him the script to Dead Poets Society.